Re: [RFC 00/10] R300 QEMU device V2

["Philippe Mathieu-Daudé" <philmd@redhat.com>]

Cc'ing more.

On 11/27/19 4:05 PM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 27, 2019 at 04:00:01PM +0100, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
>> Hi Daniel, Aaron.
>>
>> On 11/26/19 3:19 PM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
>>> On Tue, Nov 26, 2019 at 06:14:27PM +0530, aaron.zakhrov@gmail.com wrote:
>>>> From: Aaron Dominick <aaron.zakhrov@gmail.com>
>>>>
>>>> I have removed the botched patches and have got the code working upto the GART initialization.
>>>> I am not sure how to implement the GART. I am guessing it should be an IOMMU device but I think that is a bit much for an emulated card.
>>>> The earlier problem of display probing seems to be resolved by using an R300 bios I got from TechPowerUP's GPU database:
>>>>
>>>> 	https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/14509/14509
>>>> I am NOT sure if we can distribute it in the QEMU source tree. If it
>>>> does cause problems I can send a patch to remove it.
>>>
>>> That site seems to be a repository of BIOS uploaded by arbitrary users,
>>> with no information on what license terms might apply to the uploads.
>>>
>>> We have to therefore assume the worst and treat the BIOS images on that
>>> site as proprietary and not re-distributable, despite the fact that the
>>> site itself is acting as a 3rd party distributor.
>>
>> We can not redistribute this BIOS.
>>
>>> IOW, we can't have this in QEMU git I'm afraid, unless someone can find
>>> a trustworthy vendor source for the original image with accompanying
>>> license information.
>>
>> Daniel, I think there is no problem if Aaron contributes a model of the R300
>> device to QEMU, right? This doesn't involve redistributing any BIOS.
> 
> Having just the device impl doesn't cause any legal problems.
> 
> It does become a slight usability issue, as any users need to go and find
> the suitable BIOS in order to use the device. No downstream OS vendors are
> going to be able to distribute this BIOS either
> 
> I don't know if we have hit this problem before & if we have any
> general policies about it ?

This appears to me the same case as a user downloading a proprietary 
driver/firmware at some vendor website, accepting the EULA, then using 
the driver within a QEMU VM.

No close source blob are redistributed, but users can still run them, 
and both party (the QEMU project, and the users) are legally correct, 
right? But IANAL.